In the winter of 1290, Eleanor of Castile, the beloved medieval queen of King Edward I, died at the age of forty-nine. Today, she is most famous for the stone monuments erected in her honour by her grieving husband: the Eleanor crosses. Built along the route of her funeral procession (the longest in British history), the crosses extended from Lincoln to Charing Cross in London. But who was the woman who inspired these imposing monuments? Was she the power behind the throne? A greedy Spanish heiress with eyes on a property empire? A passionate lover? A steady companion to a notoriously ruthless monarch? Or another unfairly maligned woman from the annals of British history? In this playful and ingenious book, historian Alice Loxton journeys to the heart of these questions. Tracing the path of the procession as it appears in the present day, from a shopping precinct in Dunstable to a church in St Albans, she gathers stories of this elusive, forgotten queen. In the process, she provides new insight into both medieval history and, more broadly, the ways in which the stories of our past continue to shape contemporary Britain.
